


Differences

by Mici (noharlembeat)



Category: The Hunger Games
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-12-20
Updated: 2010-12-20
Packaged: 2017-10-13 21:02:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,564
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/141691
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/noharlembeat/pseuds/Mici
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Growing up in the Capitol and how not to relish in violence.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Differences

**Author's Note:**

  * For [sprat](https://archiveofourown.org/users/sprat/gifts).



You can’t remember your first feast.

You know, the way you know your history and your facts, that it happened around the time you were four or five, because that was around the same time that your mother’s first designs became popular with the Capitol’s wealthy. You remember getting ready for it, and you remember it was a feast with the Victors, during the games, where they tried to get rich people to sponsor their Tributes. You remember wearing a suit in dark grey, tailored for your body, because you remember having to sit there and have the tailor stick pins in it.

But then your memory blanks out like a television, and then next thing you remember is the car ride home and your mother kissing someone who isn’t your father, but that’s all right because you’re warm and full, and falling asleep is so easy.

He sort of became a staple at your house after that; reliably, like clockwork, the games would come and so would he. He wasn’t very handsome, you don’t think. He wasn’t even very nice. Sometimes he would scowl and curse and hit people, like the Avox your mother bought after she sold her first line. But he never hit you. His eyes always softened a little when he looked at you, and he would play all kinds of fun games with you, games that you don’t always remember the details of but they were always foreign and different. They weren’t like the games you played at school with your friends.

And then the fall would come and the Games would end and he would go away, back to District 8, and your mother might cry a little, but it was never anything tragic. School would start again anyway and you would get lost in facts and numbers and history.

The first Games you remember being invested in were when you were nine. Before then, they were a summer thing. You knew what they were, of course, because everyone did, but you weren’t interested in it, really. He would be there during the Games and so you never watched because there were other things to do, with him in the house. But the year you were nine, suddenly everything sharpened into clear-cut focus.

That was the year he was a Mentor, and he couldn’t come to the house.

You didn’t know the politics of it, back then. You don’t remember exactly what your mother did to bring him into the spotlight but you do remember watching the girl from District 5 have her head chopped off with an axe on television. You remember, a few weeks after the Games, being taken to the re-enactment on a tour, and seeing the spot, and getting sick to your stomach. Your mother blamed the rough outdoors. You always had a soft disposition.

You don’t blame the outdoors. You blame the memory of blood splashing against a tree like red paint, you blame the memory of the girl’s face, her mouth an ‘o’ as if she was singing, not screaming.

You get so sick because of it that you refuse to go to school. You don’t want people to ask you what it was like, the re-enactment, you don’t want them to ask you about the food you didn’t eat. You don’t want to have to replay it over for others when you replay it enough for yourself.

The next summer he comes but you can’t look at him. The entire year, you’ve spent looking for the tapes of his Games, and you watched him gore a girl who is only a couple of years older than you are. He asks you what’s wrong, and he sounds worried, like you might be someone he cares about. But you don’t know how it’s possible.

You’ve figured out the secret, and you remember that especially. It’s not that he chose to do this. He wasn’t a volunteer, a Career. It’s not that you imagined that most people want to go, to kill others, and certainly everyone knows the difference between _Tribute_ and _Career_ but for some reason, it felt like a secret to you. Like you shouldn’t have known that the Capitol forced it on him. How can he worry about you when it was people like you that made him kill a little girl? You don’t ask him that. You spend time drawing instead, and he asks your mother, and she says that you’ve been acting funny since last summer, and he watches you. You wish he would turn those blue eyes somewhere else. They see too much, you think. He’s smarter than he lets on. It makes you especially scared.

The summer that you’re fifteen, he doesn’t come back. He doesn’t come to the Capitol at all, banished by your mother who is now seeing more than one man. In a sexually liberated city like this one, a woman of means and status has more options than simply one washed-up District 8 Victor. You notice but only barely, because you’ve been spending most of your summers since you were ten unfocusedly watching the games through a haze of disgust at everyone else. Being at home hasn’t been something you’ve aspired to.

You remember the first time you meet Finnick Odair, when he’s sixteen and you’re eighteen, and his smile turns your insides into jelly. You’ve never felt that way about anyone – your classmates, female, male, they think you’re cold because all you do is draw, interning for your mother’s company and preparing to test into the Art Academy. But Finnick Odair does that to you. You suppose he does it to everyone. He smiles and his eyes seem to light up and you wonder how your knees are still supporting you.

You avoid him.

Unfortunately, he doesn’t avoid you. Finnick Odair is like a cat; he knows precisely who doesn’t want to be near him, and those are the people who he gravitates towards. You meet him when you’re delivering something to his stylist, and he keeps running into you when you’re eating breakfast or when you’re at parties. He’s important and you don’t know why. Finnick reminds you of _him_ ; beautiful, smart, charming. He reminds of you of everything your mother loves in a man; appropriate because your mother is charmed by him, and charms him to stay. That reminder is why you tell him, in confidence, whispering that you don’t want to be a stylist, you hate the games, you’re sorry about everything the Capitol has done. Finnick touches your hair and kisses you softly on the temple, but he doesn’t forgive you for being born to this. No one can.

He’s the first one who looks at your work and says you should be a stylist. He jokes, casually, that you might make an original thought where there haven’t been any. Unsurprisingly, your mother latches onto the idea, and you never have been able to say no to her; she’s your mother, the person who supported you through everything, even with her extravagant life demanding her attention. So instead you say nothing at all.

You don’t want to be a stylist, although your eye for design would make you a very good one. You don’t like being near the Victors; you don’t even like the games. They still make you sick. You make it through them by getting very drunk, or by not watching the feeds at all, both of which are a challenge because you don’t like to be drunk, and the feeds are everywhere. Instead you work. You work out all your frustrations and all your horror and all your gut clenching sickness into beautiful dresses that your mother wants to market and your teachers display on the bodies of emaciated victims of the Capitol. It is fashionable to be thin and svelte and fashion caters to fashion, so all your dresses are designed for women who spend hours in surgery to make them thin and lovely. You are angry the first time one of your dresses ends up on a Victor’s body, because that’s not what you design for, but she looks ethereal, like the wind.

You don’t know what it means, that the only women who can wear your gowns without alteration are women from the Districts. Everyone looks so hungry.

You’re twenty-two when your mother’s former lover comes back, and you don’t know what to do. They never come back – your father certainly didn’t, when your mother ran him out when you were young.

He sees you before you see him and when he corners you, he doesn’t look nearly as big as you remember. Instead he looks wasted; his cheekbones are high but his cheeks are sunken in, his muscles hang limply over his frame. The usual Mentor from District 8 died this year, he tells you, and you know that but you listen anyway. He had to come back even though he didn’t want to, he adds, and you think that might be a dangerous thing to say – at the very least it’s impolitic – but you don’t notice.

That’s when Finnick Odair finds the both of you. Odair smiles and greets him by name, and you smile and greet Finnick by name, and he doesn’t smile at all, but instead looks at the both of you. You imagine him imagining his youth, beautiful and sunny and gloriously Victorious, maybe. Or you imagine him and your mother, almost twenty years ago, kissing in the back of a car with a small boy drowsing against the door.

He walks away later after a bland and boring conversation in which you’re almost certain the weather was the main topic, and Finnick looks curiously intrigued. You don’t let the Victor from 4 linger with that curiosity. Your past belongs to you, just like you don’t ask Finnick about the Victor from last year, and why she isn’t at these Games. You think you see the two Victors, later, heads bent together, and there is ice in your gut, because you wonder if they are talking about you, and what will happen.

But nothing does.

You’re slaving away for a designer who still thinks the highest and most creative expression of modern fashion is velvet. You’re desperate now. You graduated from school, and your mother keeps putting pressure on you to become a stylist, because you have the talent, she says. You want to design clothes for real people, though. You want stay out of the limelight. It’s bad enough you know two Victors, you don’t want anyone else to know you, not like that. Not as someone who is privy to the horrors of these games. You just want to make something pretty, something that makes all the ugly of the games wash away come autumn. You want your specialty to be autumn and spring formal wear. Everyone else designs for summer and winter. Another year passes.

The truth is you’re desperate because this decision grates on you more and more. Every time you look at the television, there’s a memory of someone dying gruesomely – getting gored, getting stabbed, choked, killed, and there’s always a thrill about it from the announcers. You watch and you wonder who the families are. You wonder if there is justice for something that was done to the Capitol before any of these children were even alive. You wonder how anyone can endorse that. You think about your mother, and wonder if she’s ever thought of it that way, and it makes you sad to imagine her, alone, childless, if you and she were members of the second-class, District citizens.

You get sick about it, and you focus on work. There is no space for distraction here. It is late, then, so late you forget the hour that you look up and he’s there, looking at you with eyes that make you think of your childhood, and you freeze. You ask him what he’s doing here.

He tells you what you do is amazing. That you’re better than your mother was at this, and you know that’s a lie because there isn’t anyone who is better than your mother. He smiles when you say that, like you’ve done something special, and you rest your hands on your paper, and they’re shaking, and you don’t know why.

He tells you that you should be a stylist, that you were born for it, and you almost scream at him to get out when you see that his face isn’t proud when he says that. It’s desperately, terrifyingly sad, like he’s just made a pronouncement he can’t take back. He tells you that he talked to Finnick about you, that there are differences you can make. He tries to tell you what those differences are, but he just looks around, and he looks afraid, and you stare, because even though you’re angry enough to see red you can’t you’re your face away from this. He hands you a slim card with a single name on it. Plutarch Heavensbee. You recognize it vaguely – society isn’t that large, even here – and you just look at him curiously.

He shakes his head and tells you again that you can make a difference, as if the words are a balm against pain.

It takes you a year to figure out what that means. In that year you pointedly don’t call Heavensbee. In that year you think about starting your own line, you think about taking over your mother’s store, you think about everything but what he said, about making a difference. What can a Stylist do, anyway?

You spend time with your mother, who smiles at you and brushes your hair back and suggests you dye your skin blue, because it’s in fashion this year, and you know she only wants what’s best for you. You consider yourself lucky. Some parents want ambition from their children, but your mother, your flighty, promiscuous, beautiful mother only wants you to fit in. She tells you she knows how hard it’s been for you. You’ve always been a sensitive soul.

It’s not curiosity that finally makes you call him. It’s something more complicated than that. It’s watching the games from the thousandth time and watching the Tribute from District 8 die a slow, painful death because the girl who stabbed him didn’t have time to stick around and wait, she had to run before someone else killed her. You’ve only seen strangers die. What about him?

He wants you to make a difference. Isn’t that the least you can do?

You pick up the phone, then. You watch the Games, because someone has to see past the blood and the glory the Capitol attaches to it. These children are dying and no one cares and you haven’t had the courage to watch them do it, not until now, not until a man who wasn’t your father and who wasn’t your mother’s anything except her toy told you that you can make a difference. You can’t.

But you can witness. It will make you sick, and horrified, and scared, but that’s what you can do.

The phone is cold in your hand, and against your ear. You feel like your voice should be trembling, but it doesn’t shake, not even a little bit.

“Hello, is this Plutarch Heavensbee? My name is Cinna.”


End file.
